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Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run ThemTue, 31 Mar 2015 19:48:35 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1IARPA Seeks Partners in Brain-Inspired AI Initiativehttp://www.hpcwire.com/2015/01/22/iarpa-seeks-partners-brain-inspired-ai-initiative/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=iarpa-seeks-partners-brain-inspired-ai-initiative
http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/01/22/iarpa-seeks-partners-brain-inspired-ai-initiative/#commentsFri, 23 Jan 2015 00:40:32 +0000http://www.hpcwire.com/?p=17115US intelligence officials have set in motion a five-year project to spark progress in machine learning by reverse-engineering the algorithms of the human brain. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) recently put out a call for innovative solutions with the greatest potential to advance theories of neural computation as part of the Machine Intelligence

]]>US intelligence officials have set in motion a five-year project to spark progress in machine learning by reverse-engineering the algorithms of the human brain. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) recently put out a call for innovative solutions with the greatest potential to advance theories of neural computation as part of the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program. The agency, known for its funding of high-risk/high-payoff research in support of national intelligence, is ultimately looking to facilitate the development of synthetic systems with brain-like performance and proficiency.

In a just-issued broad agency announcement, IARPA lays out its strategy for fostering multidisciplinary approaches at the intersection of data science and neuroscience that increase scientific understanding of the cortical computations underlying neural information processing. Although there has been much progress in modeling machine learning algorithms after neural processes, the brain remains far better-suited for a host of detection and recognition tasks.

The agency sees the emerging research area of neurally-inspired machine learning as crucial for closing the performance gap between software and wetware.

“Despite significant progress in machine learning over the past few years, today’s state of the art algorithms are brittle and do not generalize well,” the proposal’s authors contend. “In contrast, the brain is able to robustly separate and categorize signals in the presence of significant noise and non-linear transformations, and can extrapolate from single examples to entire classes of stimuli. This performance gap between software and wetware persists despite some correspondence between the architecture of the leading machine learning algorithms and their biological counterparts in the brain, presumably because the two still differ significantly in the details of operation. The MICrONS program is predicated on the notion that it will be possible to achieve major breakthroughs in machine learning if we can construct synthetic systems that not only resemble the high-level blueprints of the brain, but also employ lower-level computing modules derived from the specific computations performed by cortical circuits.”

The MICrONS program consists of three Technical Areas (TAs), defined as follows:

TA3 – reconstruction of cortical circuits from neuroanatomical data and development of information technology systems to store, align, and access neural circuit reconstructions with the associated neurophysiological and neuroanatomical data.

“Over the course of the program, participants will use their improving understanding of the representations, transformations, and learning rules employed by the brain to create ever more capable neurally-derived machine learning algorithms,” the IARPA proposal further explains. “Ultimate computational goals for MICrONS include the ability to perform complex information processing tasks such as one-shot learning, unsupervised clustering, and scene parsing, aiming towards human-like proficiency.”

MICrONS is set to run from September 2015 through September 2020. A summary of the scientific and technical objectives of each program phase as well as a very comprehensive set of metrics for each of the technical areas are detailed in the full 70-page solicitation [PDF].

]]>The Obama administration has revealed plans for an ambitious decade-long brain mapping project, similar in scope to the Human Genome Project.

Remarks made by the President in his 2013 State of the Union speech were soon confirmed by this Tweet from National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins: “Obama mentions the #NIH Brain Activity Map in #SOTU.”

A more formal acknowledgement came from National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Director Story C. Landis. Cited in the New York Timesarticle that broke the story, Landis also connected Obama’s statements to the Brain Activity Map (BAM) project.

The genesis for the project can be traced back to a scientific article published in last June’s Neuron.

“The function of neural circuits is an emergent property that arises from the coordinated activity of large numbers of neurons,” writes the six-author team. “To capture this, we propose launching a large-scale, international public effort, the Brain Activity Map Project, aimed at reconstructing the full record of neural activity across complete neural circuits. This technological challenge could prove to be an invaluable step toward understanding fundamental and pathological brain processes.”

The journal article outlines several ways the mapping could be approached and points to potential treatments for schizophrenia and autism.

Parties involved in the project’s planning estimate it will cost at least $300 million a year, or $3 billion over the 10-year span. By comparison, the Human Genome Project totaled $3.8 billion. That initiative, which sought the complete mapping of human genome, finished ahead of schedule in April 2003, and according to a federal impact study showed a return of $800 billion by 2010.

A lot is being made of the similarity of these two projects and the potential for big science spending to invigorate the economy.

“Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy – every dollar,” Obama said. “Today our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s. They’re developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs, devising new materials to make batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation. Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the space race. We need to make those investments.”

But how alike are these two projects really? The scientific consensus is that mapping and understanding the brain is a far more complex endeavor than a full accounting of human DNA.

Dr. Ralph J. Greenspan, one of the authors of the Neuron paper, highlighted the distinction:

“It’s different in that the nature of the question is a much more intricate question. It was very easy to define what the genome project’s goal was. In this case, we have a more difficult and fascinating question of what are brainwide activity patterns and ultimately how do they make things happen?”

According to NYT reporting, BAM is a joint project of the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation and will be organized by the Office of Science and Technology Policy. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md., and the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle were listed as private partners.

The US brain mapping project comes on the heels of the Swiss brain modeling project, unveiled last month. The European Commission just awarded half a billion euros to the Human Brain Project – an extension of Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project that aims “to simulate a complete human brain in a supercomputer.”

The BAM project, on the other hand, is working to create a functional map of the active human brain. The six contributors to the Neuron article write that “understanding how the brain works is arguably one of the greatest scientiﬁc challenges of our time.” Despite the inevitable difficulties, it looks like the research community is eager to unlock the mysteries of this frontier.

The journal article concludes with this call to action:

To succeed, the BAM Project needs two critical components: strong leadership from funding agencies and scientiﬁc administrators, and the recruitment of a large coalition of interdisciplinary scientists. We believe that neuroscience is ready for a large-scale functional mapping of the entire brain circuitry, and that such mapping will directly address the emergent level of function, shining much-needed light into the “impenetrable jungles” of the brain.

Further details are expected when Obama unveils his budget next month.